WLAN Parabolic Antenna Reflectors
Now that I have the Asus WL-500g Premium hooked up and working, I have decided to do a little fine tuning of the wireless coverage. Because the wireless router is located in the basement, wireless coverage has always been a bit flaky in our upstairs office where we keep a desktop. I know it's a bad idea to place the router in the basement and that you're supposed to place your router high and in the center of the house. Unfortunately, with the telephone wiring in our old house, that's just not possible.
So, what to do to improve coverage on the first floor?
- I have decided not to mess with the radio output power on the WL-500gP. I don't want to boil the skin off another household member and besides, the default power setting on my WL-500gP appears to be at maximum (issuing the command 'wl txpwr1′ in the WL-500gP's hidden admin page reports 'TxPower is 127 qdbm, 31.75 dbm, 1496 mW Override is Off').
- I am going to check the different channels and see, if signal strength and noise varies between channels.
- I am looking into parabolic reflectors to use with router antennas. I have built a couple of DIY 6 inch reflectors, but I might also try the commercial Flatenna and a corner reflector.
The 6 inch DIY reflectors seem to work quite well. I have only tried them out in the basement between the main WL-500gP and my WRT54G wireless bridge, but I experience an improvement close to the "advertised" 9 dB gain. Before attaching the reflectors, the wireless bridge reported an RSSI between -66 and -72 dB and after attaching the reflectors RSSI went to between -55 and -64 dB. I have constructed the reflectors really fast and simple (printed reflector template on thick paper, to which I glued kitchen tin foil), but I might try to see if being more careful and using the foiled cardboard from a cut open Pringle's can yield further improvement.
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November 4th, 2006 at 18:28
Hi,
I want to make one of the parabolic reflectors but when I try to download the templates from the site it doesn’t appear to be working. I have been trying for a while now but without success.
I was wondering if you by any chance had kept the templates for the ez-10 and 12 and could somehow send them to me.
Many thanks if you can help me there, regards Paul.